Next Gen Consortium to appoint chief exec

The Next Generation Internet Consortium is looking for a chief executive to help put the day-to-day management of the organisation in place as well as build its business case and search for seed funding.

The Next Generation Internet Consortium is looking for a chief executive to help put the day-to-day management of the organisation in place as well as build its business case and search for seed funding.

Currently the NGI Consortium is being run as part of InternetNZ while it sets itself up - however InternetNZ working group chair Neil James expects that to change with the appointment of the chief executive.

"I'm hoping we can find someone before Christmas so they can do all the hard work while we're on holiday," he says.

The NGI Consortium was born from a working group of InternetNZ that aims to develop New Zealand's access to next generation network schemes that are in place around the world. Such schemes are already well-advanced, looking at very high speed connectivity, and New Zealand has so far been left out.

The consortium already has 12 member organisations - each paying $15,000 for their place - that include all the country's universities, AgResearch, CityLink, Natural History New Zealand and the latest member, the National Library.

"We expect several others, literally in the next week or two and I would expect InternetNZ itself to join."

James says the funding will help set up the Consortium itself, rather than build a network, however it's early days yet.

"There's some hope that we could do that under operational procedures and paying capital through forward cash flow or something. All these things have to be worked through."

Applications for the job, which will be based in Wellington, have already closed however James says the crop of applicants is a good one.

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